09/15/2026
There's just one problem with this famous Kentucky quote... Daniel Boone probably never said it.
(my apologies for the novel)
You've probably seen the words "Heaven must be a Kentucky kind of place" credited to Daniel Boone. This mural in Bloomfield, Kentucky carries on that familiar tradition — but the history behind the quote tells a different story.
The earliest known version dates to 1818, when Presbyterian minister Isaac Reed recorded a story about an unidentified preacher describing Heaven to a Kentucky congregation as "a Kentucky of a place."
There is no known contemporary evidence that Boone ever spoke the famous words.
The strongest starting point is Isaac
Reed's, “The Christian Traveller” (1828).
Reed included a letter he wrote from Kentucky dated February 10, 1818.
He said a local resident told him about a preacher who had preached nearby and, while describing Heaven, said: "O my dear honeys, Heaven is a Kentucky of a place."
Most importantly, Reed immediately added that he was simply repeating the story as it had been told to him. This was recorded while Daniel Boone was still alive, yet Boone wasn't connected with the saying.
A second piece of evidence comes from 1827, when another account called the speaker a Methodist preacher. Later 19th-century versions continued attributing variations of the saying to Kentucky preachers — not Boone.
There's even a wonderful Kentucky historical source: Confederate general and Kentuckian Basil W. Duke, writing about Kentucky, repeated the saying as coming from "an old pioneer preacher," not Daniel Boone.
In Boone's narrative dictated to John Filson and published in 1784, Boone described returning from Kentucky determined to bring his family there, referring to Kentucky as: "which I esteemed a second paradise"
That is a legitimate early Boone quotation.
